Three years after he started to
study telepathy, on August 20, 1922, Bernard Bernardovich Kazhinskiy
arrived as part of a four-man delegation at the labs of Vladimir L.
Durov, Russia’s most famous animal trainer. Durov was almost 60, and
he’d spent most of his life in the circus. At first, he had been a
trapeze artist and clown, but as the years passed, his act began to
focus on animals—dogs, monkeys, ducks, geese, goats, guinea pigs, bears,
lions.

Over time, Durov became known for his
ability to communicate with trained animals by “mental suggestion,”
which was exactly what interested Kazhinskiy. He wanted to unlock the
mysteries of what he called “biological radio communications,” and Durov
and dogs seemed like the perfect candidates for the animal experiments
he wanted to conduct. Under the Soviet government, Durov’s home had
become a center for research on animal psychology, and that day, after
the head of the delegation kissed Durov in greeting and made
introductions, everyone agreed—Kazhinskiy would come work in Durov’s
lab.

Over the course of about two years, Durov
and Kazhinskiy would conduct close to 1,300 experiments testing
telepathic commands on dogs. This line of research would come to have
more importance than most investigations of psychic phenomena: In the
decades that followed, it would lead into a Cold War battle to obtain
unconventional weapons, during which both sides tried to enhance
military parapsychological capabilities and, most famously, America
experimented with “men who stared at goats”
in order to try to stop their hearts. As Kazhinskiy noted in his 1962
report on his work, the U.S. would eventually become quite interested in
telepathy, but “it appears that the main reason… is that the results
might be of great military significance.”

In the 1920s, though, Kazhinskiy wanted only to see if Durov could psychically communicate simple ideas to his dogs. According to Kazhinskiy’s later report, translated in the 1960s by the U.S. Air Force’s Foreign Technology Division, they succeeded.

Kazhinskiy had started his career as an
electrical engineer working in radio research, but he had also been
fascinated by the possibility that living creatures could broadcast
information by some radio-like means. “I had to find in the human
organism the elements that were structurally and functionally similar to
the basic components of a transmitting and receiving radio station,” he
wrote in his book, Biological Radio Communications. “I had to make a thorough study of the nervous system.”

Kazhinskiy wasn’t the only Soviet scientist interested in this line of research, as Wladimir Veminski writes in Homo Sovieticus,
a newly translated exploration of “Brain Waves, Mind Control, and
Telepathic Destiny” in the Soviet era. A few years before Kazhinskiy
joined Durov’s lab, another scientist, Vladimir M. Bekhterev, a rival of
Ivan Pavlov, had presented Durov’s work at the Institute for Brain
Research, describing his technique for transmitting the commands. Nor
were the Russians the only ones investigating dogs’ psychic connections:
in Germany, around the same time, one wealthy parapsychology enthusiast
tried to measure the psychic bond between man and dog.

“I look into Mars’ eyes or, rather, very deep into his eyes and beyond them.”

To use his mind to give a command to a
dog, Durov would start by looking deeply into the dog’s eyes. He would
direct all his mental powers toward imagining the exact task the dog was
to perform, as if he were looking through the dog’s own eyes. After
implanting the idea in the dog’s brain, Durov would give the order to
act it out.

Here’s how he described giving a
telepathic command to a dog named Mars: “I look into Mars’ eyes or,
rather, very deep into his eyes and beyond them. I make passes at the
dog, stroking him slightly on the sides of his head, above the mouth,
the shoulders, barely touching his fur… The dog points his nose almost
vertically, as if it were falling into a trance. My movements deprive
the dog of all his will, and he remains in such a state as if he were
part of my internal ‘ego.’ A communication or ‘psychic contact’ has thus
been established between my thoughts and Mars’ subconsciousness.”

According to his memoir, Durov first
experienced his power to affect dogs this way under dramatic
circumstances. When he was young, he bet his friends that he could go
into an abandoned house where a dangerous dog was kept locked up and the
dog would not touch him. When he entered the dog rushed at him, but
Durov caught his eye and kept it. The dog slowed, stopped, and
retreated, as Durov mentally compelled him to stay back. Durov left the
house safe, untouched by the dog, and immediately passed out. (It’s
possible, of course, that Durov managed to influence the dog with his
body language, not with telepathic powers. In his book, Kazhinskiy does
mention that telepathy has skeptics, but he doesn’t seem to consider any
other possible explanations for the phenomena he’s observing. Those
skeptics, too, are often convinced to Kazhinskiy’s side after seeing the
results of his experiments.)

In his time with the animal trainer, Kazhinskiy documented 1,278 experiments on telepathic dog training over 20 months.

In one experiment, on November 17, 1922,
Durov and another experimenter choose an object for a dog (Mars, again)
to fetch—a telephone book in a room down the hall from the lab. The
first time Durov tried to tell Mars to get the book, the dog ran from
the armchair where he was seated to the middle of the room. The second
time, the dog tried to close the room’s door. The third time, though, he
went through the door, into the hallway, into the other room, and
searched about. When he found the telephone book, he grabbed it in his
mouth and brought it back to the original room. “Despite the first two
unsuccessful attempts, the experiment must be considered as highly
successful,” Kazhinskiy writes.

In another set of experiments with a
different dog, Pikki, the researchers brought the animal to an
unfamiliar apartment and gave him a series of telepathic commands.
Following Durov’s mental instructions, he performed a series of tasks;
for instance, he “jumped off the chair, ran to the chair near the wall
and just as quickly jumped up on the round table and, standing on his
hind legs, reached the lower part of the portrait and began to scratch
it with his paws.”

Kazhinskiy also built a Faraday cage,
which interrupts the transmission of electrical signals, to test his
theory about how Durov was communicating telepathically with the dogs.
He had the trainer try his mental command strategy while sitting inside
the shut cage and with the door open. “The very first trial tests
revealed that my assumptions had been correct,” Kazhinskiy writes. “When
the cage door was closed, V.L. Durov sitting inside was unable to
transmit to the test animal (the dog Mars) outside a mental assignment.
But as soon as the door was opened, Mars carried out every order with
precision.”

Overall, Kazhinsky reports, 696 of their
experiments with mental suggestions to dogs were successful; 582 were
not. According to a zoologist/statistician at Moscow State University,
an analysis of the results showed that “the dogs’ responses were not
accidental but produced under the influence of the experimenters.”
Telepathy apparently worked. With dogs, at least.

“Compel me mentally to make some
movement, I am curious to know what I will think in the process,”
Kazhinskiy told Durov. “Can you do it?”

“Easily,” Durov said. “You just sit quietly.”

They were sitting alone, across from each
other at a table, and Durov wrote down a command on a piece of paper.
The two men locked eyes.

“I didn’t feel anything in particular,
but suddenly and automatically I touched the skin behind my ear with the
fingers of my right hand,” Kazhinskiy writes.

Immediately Durov handed him the piece of paper, on which he had written, “Scratch behind your right ear.”

These experiments had an
innocence and exuberance to them: Kazhinskiy seems to be motivated by
the pure spirit of scientific industry. But as conflict between the U.S.
and the Soviet Union arose following World War II, both sides would try
to harness this type of telepathic power for more nefarious means,
including long-distance psychic spying and the aforementioned goat
assassinations.

None were as successful as a Durov’s dog experiments
were reported to be, though. Since the 1920s, there has been no
revolution in telepathic dog training; later investigations have come up
short. Perhaps Durov had some special mental powers; perhaps he was a
very, very good animal trainer. These experiments do seem easily
replicable, though. If you succeed in transmitting a telepathic command
to a dog… let us know?

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About Me

This is a blog about what interests me. Here you will find stories on animals, including animal rights material, cute stuff, and random informative posts about weird, beautiful and interesting creatures. Horses, Spotted Hyenas, and Border Collies will make regular appearances.
Also prominently featured will be posts about the Arts. Animation, photography, and the traditional forms, plus "outsider art," film and books.
Other things that will surface here are Japan & the Japanese, John Oliver, surfing, skateboarding and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, interesting places and structures,and my own art, writing and photography.
There will be rants. It's an election year, and I am beginning to have a political dimension to my personality. I am also horrified at the level of injustice and violence visited upon people here in the US and elsewhere - particularly against people of color, immigrants, and the LGBT community. Some of these stories will be very hard to read, but I believe we must read them to keep ourselves mindful of the racist and vicious things that happen every day, to speak out when we see discrimination, and root out its evil from ourselves.